The US Air Force used its largest aircraft to transport $5 billion worth of illegal drugs from a storage facility in California to eventually destroy them in the Midwest.
The initiative, called Operation Burnout, was “the largest recorded airlift of dangerous drugs for destruction,” the Air Force said in a news release Tuesday. The operation lasted from May 18 to May 20 and began at March Air Force Reserve Base in Riverside County, from where 50 tons of seized drugs were airlifted on a C-5M Super Galaxy aircraft to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
The drugs, which included fentanyl, cocaine and methamphetamine, were then transported to a facility in Indiana for “final destruction,” the Air Force said.
Gerald Mapp, a senior adviser to the Defense Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration, said in a press release that the recent closure of large hazardous materials destruction facilities has left authorities with growing piles of seized drugs.
“We have to store these things as soon as we confiscate them in an approved warehouse, but new things are always coming in,” he said. “You have to look at fentanyl as a serious problem: one pill can kill you.”
Authorities said the C-5M Super Galaxy helped speed up the drug destruction process and also helped crews avoid ambushes, thefts and other logistical problems.
“If we had not partnered with the Air Force, we would have had to transport it across multiple states, which would have required tons of manpower and days,” Rashida Weathers-Hurst, chief of the DEA’s forensics division, said in a press release.
According to the Air Force website, the C-5M Super Galaxy is primarily used to transport cargo and personnel for the U.S. Department of Defense. It has five sets of landing gear, 28 wheels and four engines, and can carry 281,001 pounds of cargo.
In California, authorities have been stepping up their crackdown on illegal drugs, especially fentanyl, in recent years. In March, California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced that California Highway Patrol officers had seized 2,549 pounds of drugs over the past two years, including more than 50,110 grams of fentanyl.